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Do you enjoy making crafts?  What about chatting with friends, doing some quick community service, eating food while you're at it, and jamming out to music?  If even one of these points sounds appealing to you, consider joining an Academy art club called ImageNation.

Rebecca "Becca" Haynes '17, ImageNation Club Founder and President, kindly answered a few questions when I inquired about her club.

Back when Becca first entered the Academy as a freshman, she perused the club offerings in hopes of finding an art club.  Since the Punahou Academy offers such a wide variety of clubs, Becca thought that there had to be a club focused on drawing, painting, and other art forms.

To Becca's dismay, she was unable to find the club she'd hoped for.  With encouragement from friends, Becca decided to found her own club: ImageNation.

Becca acknowledged that "the goal of this club is to provide a relaxing, no-judgement space for anyone and everyone to create art." ImageNation members can also explore new styles and mediums of art, aside from traditional styles of arts and crafts many are familiar with.

ImageNation members revamped a cart for Kapiolani Medical Center with colorful paintings.

ImageNation also has a major community service component as many of the art projects made by the club are donated to the community. Becca stated that "many of the activities that set ImageNation on the path of service were founded and organized by Ms. Hail."

Ms. Hail, ImageNation's club advisor, often presents community service requests she receives from the Luke Center or colleagues to the club as suggestions for group activities. Recently, Becca has also started to play a major role in incorporating community service-based art projects into ImageNation's agenda.


Some recent "big projects" for the club include painting two carts for the Kapiolani Medical Center's Children's Wing, creating a wall-length drawing of a girl and boy reading displayed in Cooke Library, and painting a mural for the Easter Seals Autism Center.

I've had the pleasure of attending a gathering for ImageNation a few months ago. The meeting's activity was to create Halloween cards for the Kapiolani Medical Center as tray favors for patients.

At the club meeting, there was music, tasty guacamole and chips, crayons, colored pencils, watercolor, cardboard paper, other art supplies scattered everywhere, and lots of talk and laughter in the Luke Center Lilypond Room. At the end of the gathering, not only was there a sizeable pile of cards to donate to the hospital, but big smiles on members' faces as a result of being able to distress, catch up with friends, and give back to the community all at once.


The club gathers roughly once a month for 90 minutes after school, often on Tuesdays. If anyone is interested in learning more about ImageNation, you can contact Becca at rhaynes17@punahou.edu.

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Hawaii has been faced with a serious homelessness problem for decades, with nearly 5,000 homeless individuals on Oahu alone. Of these individuals, many struggle to put food on the table every day.

The holiday season is a great time to celebrate and share food with family and friends. Every year, Punahou gives back and shares with the hungry in Hawaii. This past November, the Luke Center set a goal to fill an entire Hawaii Foodbank truck with canned good donations. According to Carri Morgan, the Director of the Luke Center, Punahou School collected around 10,000 pounds of food together.

Visit the Hawaii Foodbank website here

To help Hawaii's hunger problem, I volunteered with KEY Club to collect canned goods from the donation bins and bring them to the Learning Commons, where students could stack cans to create a display at the front of Cooke Library. It was rewarding to see the can structure slowly grow as the drive continued and students came together to give back to the community.

Marisa Nagata '18, another KEY Club member, reflected on her experience and shared, "Even when there were only a few cans in the bins, we were so happy because it meant that people took the time to collect cans and bring them to school. It's going toward a worthy cause, and it was so nice to see firsthand how much students care."